1. Field
The following description relates to general, commercial, and industrial illumination, and, more particularly, to a low bay lighting apparatus configured to illuminate general, commercial, and industrial environments while being serviceable on site without disconnection of electricity or removal of the low bay lighting apparatus from its affixed location.
2. Description of the Related Art
Low bay lighting solutions are implemented in a variety of general purpose, industrial, and commercial illumination environments, such as the illumination of parking structures, transportation garages, warehouses, assembly areas, gyms, hangars, retail spaces, showrooms, and the like.
Low bay lighting applications conventionally utilize metal halide lamps. Metal halide lamps are relatively small in size and high in light output. However, metal halide lamps require extremely high pressures to operate, and generate high temperatures during operation. Thus, special fixtures are required to compensate for the extremely high pressures and temperatures. Even so, due to the high stress of operation, metal halide lamps are often subject to explosions and, thus, have the potential to cause substantial injury in the workplace or during maintenance. In addition, in order to make metal halide lamps safe to operate in everyday illumination environments, the special fixtures that metal halide lamps require necessarily sacrifice convenience and ease of installation and maintenance in order to provide the utmost safety for those who work around and maintain the metal halide lamps.
In view of the various disadvantages of metal halide lamps, low bay lighting solutions are being developed that utilize light emitting diodes (LEDs). While a significant amount of LEDs are required to equal the lighting output of metal halide lamps, techniques in optimizing LEDs for use in low bay and other illumination applications have been successful. In addition, implementations of LEDs in low bay lighting applications have been found to be much safer than implementations of metal halide lamps in low bay lighting applications. Further, low bay lighting applications that implement LEDs consume much less power than a typical metal halide lamp.
However, low bay lighting applications implementing LEDs still suffer from many drawbacks. For example, related low bay lighting applications that implement LED technology do not take into account heat buildups caused by boundary conditions created within the lamp that creating high thermal resistances.
Further, conventional low bay fixtures designed to implement LEDs are one-piece sealed units. These one-piece sealed units make component or LED replacement extremely difficult without compromising seals and ratings. Compromise of those seals and ratings often serve to invalidate the warranty of the fixture.
In addition, conventional low bay fixtures implementing LEDs are generally unable to be maintained in the field and must be removed to be serviced. Moreover, the subsequent removal of the conventional low bay fixtures implementing LEDs requires an electrical supply to be disconnected or shut down. Thus, in order to service a single related low bay fixture, electricity supplied to a numerous amount of perfectly functioning fixtures must be terminated. This termination of electricity can sometimes require a significant amount of time and participation of multiple individuals communicating over mobile devices in order to efficient service the low bay fixture.